Making a Difference

Working at TREKK gives us the opportunity to improve lives in our client’s communities. And sometimes those communities happen to be the very ones we personally call home.

I recently had the opportunity to help with some small pieces of an I&I cost analysis model, which included smoke observations in my hometown. Because I spent a majority of my life there, I took a sentimental moment to peer at the data we’ve input into the app our crews use for field data collection. I saw my step-grandfather’s house, and the house where my great-grandmother lived before she passed. Too many times my great-grandmother’s toilet would back up and the manhole out in the street would overflow. Looking closer, I saw the concentration of smoke defects in that area. I couldn’t believe that after all these years, the area was finally being investigated.

But it was a simple text message conversation with one of my TREKK colleagues that yielded an epiphany I may have never realized. After sharing with him my relationship to the client community, he reminded me that my tools are now being used to study an area that I played in as a child. I helped get the smoke testing app started and built a model to process acoustic sounding, manhole inspections and smoke testing in the app, which is being used weekly on sets of collected field data.

I didn’t realize it at first, but I got to be involved in that effort indirectly. Never, ever, would have I seen that connection in my life had my colleague not said it. I work for the firm that is going to make a difference in an area of my hometown.

Thank you, TREKK, for improving lives in my hometown, and for giving me the opportunity to take part in it. This means a lot to me.